Site: Homepage, Now with Blog & Feed

With our new front-page design, there's now 3 ways of viewing our content and featured member contributions!

Our existing homepage design was fairly long and a little dull. We had a lot of links, but not many images, or relevant ones at that. Regular readers may have seen pictures popping up in news articles over the last month, and now we've put these into practice with a brand-spanking new homepage design with 3 new flavours: All Content, Blog View and Feeds View.

All Content
With the default panel, we've got all the regular site features, with reduced space for the news, but keeping headlines as short and direct as possible. You can look through existing stories far quicker with the no-refresh button labelled "Older Stories". We wanted to emphasise our reviews and feature content a lot more, so fill the remaining space with the latest reviews. On the right there's a column for featured and recent member content, including our new feed system (see below).

Blog View
The blog view shows the same content as our regular news, but we've formatted it like your regular gaming blog. Longer content has been trimmed and can be read fully and commented on in the same way. A lot of readers have expressed interest in seeing the news as a blog, so we hope this view will offer a more accessible way of reading through the news. You can access the news blog by clicking on "news blog" at the top, or view the latest headlines through the existing view in the homepage.

Thumbs Up/Down
We're currently testing a new thumbs ranking for members wanting an instant way of running posts. Currently there's a stars system in place for weekly post ratings with comments, but you can now offer a good or bad mushroom (like thumbs up or down) to each post.

User Cards
Each post now has a mini popup card for a user - by clicking on their name or "My User Card" at the bottom. This brings additional information, including birthdays, Wii Code, contact information with a link to the full profile and blog - allowing for you to see more info on a member without leaving the page.

Revamped Games/Wishlist Management
There've been a few tweaks to the games and wishlist manager - instead of trawling through our games directory, you can use the games admin panel to add titles to your lists with a single click. To do this, login and click "Games" in the user area in the top right.

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We'll be continuing to make changes to the site over the coming months, so stay tuned for that!